Baseball: Samurai Japan opens its WBC training camp with a bang

Yu Darvish and Samurai Japan’s 26 domestically based players gave the more than 18,000 fans on hand something to cheer about as the national team’s training camp was opened on Friday.

Japan, seeking its third World Baseball Classic championship, is without four of its five MLB players, two-way star Shohei Ohtani and outfielders Masataka Yoshida, Seiya Suzuki and Lars Nootbaar, until the beginning of March. Darvish, however, was given the green light to skip the San Diego Padres’ spring training in Arizona.

Roki Sasaki, the 21-year-old who became the youngest pitcher to throw a perfect game in ...